V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

The vision of hysteria, wrongheaded, criminally irresponsible: perhaps. But it weakened me. I was overwhelmed by the cruelty of what I saw. I withdrew into my role. So too did Browne, who had talked so much of distress and dignity as discoveries in themselves, but had not thought to go further. He never learned anything beyond that first day. He remained the folk-leader, waiting like me for crunch-time. His role was his strength. Mine exposed me to danger from my colleagues.

I continued to run The Socialist as before, proclaiming the dignity of distress. My speeches maintained their old tone of protest. I never abandoned the character of the dandy. In this was neither honesty nor dishonesty; it was the easiest way out. But I became identified in the public mind with a type of opposition from within, and this won me favour. Soon I saw how by my blind consistency, my refusal to manoeuvre, my position, in the eyes of my colleagues, became one of strength and especially dangerous. I held too many of the cards. I could have got the big money on my side, to apply a squeeze here and there when necessary; I could have got the banks, the Stockwells, the bauxite companies; I could have got that middle-class to which by instinct I belonged; and I could have drawn numbers from the rural workers, picturesque Asiatics like myself, ever ready to listen to the call of the blood. I might have rescued myself from the falseness of the position of the simple sharer of distress: the convert, suspect to both the faithful and the infidel. The cards were all mine. I played none and puzzled everyone by my folly.

Like Browne, I was no politician. The prospect of power in Isabella fatigued me. Easier, much easier, the path that had been chosen for me. And there was my correspondence with Browne, and with Wendy’s brother in Quebec. To one I wrote fanciful disquisitions about the cosmic dance. To the other I wrote more and more about history, with which I was becoming absorbed. I remember I wrote a long essay about the behaviour of Pompey during the Civil War, which had always seemed to me a puzzle — this was the sort of ‘safe’ subject Browne and I now corresponded about. I thought I kept up this correspondence for the sake of the people I wrote to and for the sake of that self they saw in me. But it had the effect of deepening my conviction that I had a secret, deeper life. Below the public dandy, the political manœuvrer and organizer; below that, this negation. I distrusted romance. See, though, how I yielded to it.

A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes.

And then there was the madman’s lure: my belief in my star, not the star of fortune, but the star that, if only I surrendered to situations, if only I did what I had been called upon to do, would take me to my appointed place. The compassion of the messiah, the man doing penance for the world: I have already explained the absurd sentiments which surprised me at the moment of greatest power and self-cherishing, the feeling that we were all riding to the end of the flat world: the child’s vision, or the conqueror’s, the beginning of religion or neurosis.

THE child, driving with his grandfather along a country road on a day of rain, sees the sodden mud-and-grass huts of the estate labourers. He sees the labourers wading up to their shins in black mud which, drying, will cake white on their dark skins. He exclaims: ‘Why can’t they give them leggings?’ His grandfather says, ‘Leggings cost money.’ It is a disappointing reply, the child feels; and when he sees the compound of the overseers’ houses, ochre walls with red roofs, fair-haired children playing in the scruffy gardens, he is outraged.

The politician carries that sense of outrage as well. But sitting in the cabinet or debating in the Council, he has to see agriculture as an issue. He knows its value to the precarious economy of his country. He has the facts and figures; he knows the world price of sugar or copra; he knows who guarantees his export markets. He knows that peasant farming is uneconomical and land resettlement schemes quixotic. He knows that the interest of his country is bound up with that of the estates, and that the estates are on his side. He knows they are agreeable to some modification in taxation. He chooses to forget the figures wading in mud; he chooses to forget the outrage he felt at the overseers’ compound. All this is superficial and irrelevant; but it was that that spurred him on. All his leadership lies in taking back this message to his people. He is a politician, a man lifted out of himself.

We began in bluff. We continued in bluff. But there was a difference. We began in innocence, believing in the virtue of the smell of sweat. We continued with knowledge, of poverty and power. The colonial politician is an easy object of satire. I wish to avoid satire; I will leave out the stories of illiteracy and social innocence. Not that I wish to present him as grander or less flawed than he is. It is that his situation satirizes itself, turns satire inside out, takes satire to a point where it touches pathos if not tragedy. Out of his immense violation words come easily to him, too easily. He must go back on his words. In success he must lay aside violation. He must betray himself and in the end he has no cause save his own survival. The support he has attracted, not ideal to ideal, but bitterness to bitterness, he betrays and mangles: emancipation is not possible for all.

We had spoken, for instance, of the need to get rid of the English expatriates who virtually monopolized the administrative section of our civil service. We had represented their presence as an indignity and an intolerable strain on our Treasury. They received overseas allowances; their housing was subsidized; every three years they and their families were given passages to London. Each expatriate cost us twice as much as a local man. One degree less of innocence would have shown us how incapable we were of doing without expatriates: they were so numerous that to pay them all compensation would have wrecked our finances for at least two years, and we were in no position to break agreements. Besides, not a few of the higher technical men, in forestry and agriculture, were subsidized by London, under a generous scheme for colonial aid.

We let the issue hang. We issued a statement about our confidence in the loyalty of the civil service; and from our own lower ministerial people there emanated from time to time disingenuous parables about the black and white keys of the piano working together to create harmony. In fact, we were beginning to discover in ourselves a deep reluctance to render the civil service more local. In the secretive atmosphere of our own power game some people preferred to be served by men who were no threats to them, who at the end of their service would return to their own country.

This did not satisfy the local men. They had been among our most intelligent supporters. Now they felt betrayed; and a man of fifty does not accept the message, however sympathetically given, that he will receive promotion after his superior of forty-five has worked out a life-contract. There was much discontent. It crept into White Paper, the civil service journal which, until our advent, contained lists of appointments and transfers and retirements, news of people on leave, reports of salary negotiations, and sometimes a very carefully written short story which usually began with people drinking, elaborately, in a bar and one man being reminded of a strange incident. We decided to break one or two of the higher and more vocally disappointed local men. It was not hard. White Paper helped us. We contrasted the old acquiescence with the new irreverence and suggested that it was the new régime that was being affronted. The offending civil servants were coloured men; they spent their leaves in England and sent their children to English schools; they sought to keep their complexions clear and their hair straight by selective marriages. Their punishment was just. Nothing we said was untrue; the public approved.